Hollow fiber wound bodies are known, which are produced by the winding of a hollow fiber onto a spool. This type of production is very costly and offers only limited design options for the hollow fiber wound bodies that can be produced in this manner.
Multilayer hollow fiber wound bodies made of a spirally wound woven material or knitted material, made of hollow fibers, are also known. In this type of hollow fiber wound bodies, kinking of the hollow fibers at crossing points can occur. In addition, the production of woven and knitted materials from hollow fibers is costly.
A multilayer hollow fiber wound body is known from European Patent EP No. 81 0,093,677; the disclosed body can be produced by rolling up several layers of superposed, mutually crossing hollow fibers into a spiral form. The individual hollow fiber layers of this wound body are thus subsequently disposed in a spiral form, whereby the hollow fibers are not held by several transverse fibers. Because of the resulting absence of adequate cross mixing, convective heat or mass transport into the extra-capillary compartment in this known hollow fiber wound body leaves much to be desired. In addition, it appeared in practice that the originally regular arrangement of the hollow fibers is greatly disrupted by further processing, so that gaps form, which result in channeling, because of shifting and juxtaposing of hollow fibers. The disclosed production process is moreover very costly and offers only limited design options for the hollow fiber wound body. In addition, some hollow fibers in these hollow fiber wound bodies have deflection sites, which arise at the cylinder end because of the reversal of the traversing movement during the wrapping of the polygonal cylinder with hollow fibers. The hollow fibers can be damaged at the deflection sites by this means, i.e., become loose or even break.
A hollow fiber wound body is known from Unexamined West German Patent Application (DE-OS) No. 2,300,312, in which a plurality of layers of hollow fibers are disposed over one another on a core, whereby mutually adjacent hollow fibers proceed essentially parallel to each other within each individual layer, whereas adjacent hollow fibers of adjacent, successive hollow fiber layers cross at an angle in each case. Production proceeds by the winding of a hollow fiber also over the ends of a core in several layers, thus not by spiral winding of a hollow fiber fabric. This type of production of a hollow fiber wound body is very costly and results in a high proportion of waste, because the hollow fiber segments wound on the ends of the core must be discarded. Moreover, the absence of transverse fibers or the like not only produces inadequate cross mixing in the extra-capillary compartment, but also a very irregular structure of the hollow fiber wound body, because the generally very smooth hollow fibers slip out of place even during the production of the hollow fiber wound body, which leads to the juxtaposing of very many hollow fibers or hollow fiber sections; on the one hand, this results in channeling, and on the other, in the covering of a large portion of the surface effective in heat or mass transfer.
A hollow fiber membrane apparatus is known from East German Patent (DD-PS) No. 233,946; the apparatus is produced by preparation of webs of parallel hollow fibers, preferably by sewing, winding of the webs into a fiber bundle, and formation of connections. The fiber bundle is wound up of at least two webs, whereby the hollow fibers of adjacent webs are mutually disposed at an angle of 10.degree. to 80.degree.; this is preferably achieved in that the webs are obliquely deformed outward from the edges. The lateral interval between seams is thereby relatively large, so that in this known hollow fiber membrane apparatus as well, adjacent hollow fibers touch each other after the webs are wound into a fiber bundle; this leads to channeling and the covering of the membrane surface and consequently to deterioration in heat and/or mass transfer.